Apple Claims OpenELM Does Not Power Apple Intelligence Following YouTube Video Data Controversy: Report

Apple has reportedly claimed that the Open-source Efficient Language Models (OpenELM) AI model it released recently was not used for its Apple Intelligence or any of the company’s machine learning features. The Cupertino-based tech giant open-sourced the OpenELM model in April. The reported statement comes just days after an investigation found that the AI model was trained on datasets that contained subtitles from hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos. Notably, these datasets were also used to train AI models of Anthropic, Salesforce, Nvidia, and more.

Apple Reportedly Denies Using OpenELM for Apple Intelligence

Speaking with 9to5Mac, the iPhone maker said that OpenELM does not power either of its AI features under the Apple Intelligence branding or other machine learning features. The company also added that OpenELM was created as a contribution to the research community to help them advance the development of large language models, as per the report.

Since the AI model was designed for research purposes, it was not used for any of the in-house AI innovations of Apple, the company told the publication. Notably, OpenELM is still open-sourced, and the model weights can be accessed from the company’s Hugging Face listing.

At the time of release, Apple made the OpenELM family of AI models available in two variants — pre-trained and instruction. These models are further separated into different parameters of 270 million, 450 million, 1.1 billion, and 3 billion.

AI Models Trained on YouTube Data

A recent investigation accused Apple’s OpenELM and multiple other AI models by major AI firms of using subtitles data from YouTube videos for training. The report found that companies such as Anthropic, Salesforce, Nvidia, and others used a publicly available data repository called the Pile, which contained data from YouTube videos of major content creators such as Marques Brownlee, MrBeast, CarryMinati, and more.

While Apple denied the usage of the AI model in its devices and operating systems, Anthropic’s spokesperson Jennifer Martinez told Proof News, the publication that conducted the investigation, “The Pile includes a very small subset of YouTube subtitles. YouTube’s terms cover direct use of its platform, which is distinct from use of the Pile dataset. On the point about potential violations of YouTube’s terms of service, we’d have to refer you to the Pile authors.”